Dusseldorf. At the beginning of September, Capri Sun owner Hans-Peter Wild celebrated his 85th wedding anniversary. The beverage entrepreneur married his long-time partner, lawyer Christine Drage - appropriately on the island of Capri. It is said to have been a lavish celebration over three days. Star violinist David Garrett entertained around 170 guests.
Wild probably won't be treating himself to an extended honeymoon. On Thursday, the beverage company surprisingly announced that Wild was returning to the company's operational business.
The move follows the dismissal of company boss Roland Weening. Capri-Sun said he was relieved of his duties at Capri Sun Group Holding AG last week. The company did not provide any information about the background.
“The company will continue to be successfully managed by the existing managers and employees as well as the owner Hans-Peter Wild,” it said in a statement. Wild will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors. The newspaper “Mannheimer Morgen” had previously reported on it.
Capri-Sun sells six billion of the iconic aluminum drinking pouches every year, in more than 100 countries. External sales, sales of our own products and license fees, were most recently at $1.4 billion per year. The company cooperates with various licensees such as Kraft Heinz in the USA.
Around 1,000 employees work in 24 plants worldwide. Capri-Sun has its headquarters in Eppelheim near Heidelberg. However, the company has its headquarters in Zug, Switzerland. Wild has also lived there for more than 30 years.
Capri-Sun recently made headlines because it has been trying to return to plastic straws, which the EU had banned, since 2024. Environmental and consumer advocates criticize this.
According to its own information, the company wants to make the straw from the same material as the drinking bag: the plastic polypropylene. Capri-Sun wanted to collect one million signatures with an online petition, but only got fewer than 170,000.
“The sudden ban on straws is an existential question for us,” Wild told the Handelsblatt a few years ago. “The changeover is a huge undertaking for us with considerable costs.”
The planned sugar tax on soft drinks is also likely to put a strain on the beverage manufacturer's business in the future. Foodwatch criticized the high sugar content of some drinks. Capri-Sun says it has already reduced sugar.
Wild joined the family business in 1973. The qualified businessman and lawyer has made Capri-Sun an international bestseller. Wild's father Rudolf, a chemist, founded Zigzag Works in 1931, which produced purely natural flavors and raw materials for food. In 1951, the Libella lemonade came onto the market.
The breakthrough came when his father developed the so-called Heidelberg mixer. “He placed the mixing machine free of charge with 50 beverage manufacturers – on the condition that they buy our raw materials,” says the son.
In 1956, the German Sisi-Werke joined, which brought Capri Sonne onto the market 50 years ago. The highlight was the stand-up pouch. Back then, drinks on the go were available in three-sided tetrahedrons, for example from Sunkist in California. “We fought the market leader for a long time until he disappeared from the market,” says Wild. He fought against more than 40 imitators around the world.
The patent for the juice pouch machine was held by a Frenchman who otherwise produced sewing machines. Hans-Peter Wild was still a student and was negotiating with the inventor. “I was the only one in the company who could speak foreign languages,” says Wild, who wrote his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
“The machine was a disaster,” Wild remembers. "The bags kept leaking. So my father developed a better one." In 1974, the son moved from the oil industry to the family business and started the global expansion of Wild Flavors and Capri-Sun.
Wild's most spectacular coup was his advertising deal with Muhammad Ali. The boxer drank Capri-Sun anyway and was persuaded to do a commercial in 1979. Wild asked Ali to tell us something about the product, and the boxer spontaneously said the legendary sentence: “I am now the greatest, but when I stop boxing, Capri-Sun is gonna be the greatest.”
The spot was a breakthrough in the USA and worldwide. Because the boxer let his advertising commitments slide, Wild got a very good deal from the deal.
“Hans-Peter Wild is one of Germany’s great entrepreneurs,” Johannes Huth, partner of the US financial investor KKR, once told the Handelsblatt. “His father founded Wild Flavors, but he built it into a global market leader.”
In 2010, Wild had the financial investor KKR invest in its flavor division, which had sales of around one billion euros. In 2014, US food giant ADM took over Wild Flavors for 2.3 billion euros. Two years ago, Bloomberg reported that Capri-Sun was also looking for a minority investor.
Wild transferred his company and assets, which Forbes magazine estimates at $4.6 billion, to a Liechtenstein foundation. His brother Rainer had cashed out. Wild's sons Robert and Christoph had no interest in their father's company. So the 85-year-old is now taking care of the company's business again.
